It’s always fun trying to get people to ‘get’ what we’ve got going on for them here with Direct Media Exchange.

After all, we’re not selling plungers; we’re giving everyone an opportunity to help them manage the advertising on their websites and increase their revenue. We’re a free hosted ad server, but we also embrace things like openness, transparency, and the efficiency of an auction. Rather than look over each other’s backs, our members–advertisers and publishers alike—collaborate.

And I really like metaphors, so here’s one that describes DMX: it’s more like a waterfall. I might sound like I am trying to be cute, but I am dead serious… (more…)

Hey, maybe someone gave you a website over the holidays.

Ok, maybe you didn’t get a website for a present. But what if you did? And what if you needed more than just its own business model or service to keep it solvent, let alone thriving?

That’s where advertising comes in. And you’re lucky enough to come into the online advertising game now in 2008:

• you have mature, useful tools
• you can better control your online advertising strategies with these tools
• they make it easy to create a new revenue stream for your web business

Direct Media Exchange is what I am talking about. It’s the easiest way to

a) get ads flowing on your website

b) get ads flowing from different 3rd party ad partners

c) manage the money you make from them

You could say it’s “one application to rule them all” (apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien fans).

But wait, we’re not about ruling anything; we’re about organizing it for you on one page with one login…so you don’t have to go nuts trying to track everything yourself.

That’s why we call it ‘Direct‘.

If your current way of managing online advertising feels more… ‘indirect’…well, check out our present to you at direct.rightmedia.com. It’s the same gift we gave last year. And if you haven’t seen the video, it’s here.

And, of course, Happy New Year to you from Right Media! Have a successful and happy 2008.

Some web publishers have a small idea: create something that will help users, then get it working online somehow. Then–almost in shock–they watch it take off. That’s the magic of the web. Now add advertising to it, and suddenly you have another solid revenue flow that you didn’t expect. This happened for Sergey Chudnovsky; his website 4shared.com provides a way for people to upload and quickly organize their files online.

Sergey and his website– 4shared.com –is this month’s Direct Media Exchange Featured Publisher.

“…DMX gives us this great opportunity to join partner ad networks and get higher revenue because of the auction model.”
-Sergey Chudnovsky

Vince Panero (VP) : How did you get interested in web publishing originally? What were those early days like for you?

Sergey Chudnovsky : We just decided to create (more…)

We’ve selected Supernova.com as our new “Featured Publisher” .

‘’The concept is brilliant, and it works. It takes the hassle away from having to select and setup ad networks, allowing the ad publisher to pick and choose networks from one centralized system.'’
–Supernova.com Director of Interactive, Sanford Liu

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Of the sites we’ve selected so far as Featured Publishers for Direct Media Exchange, Supernova.com is unique. If you have a band, you go there, set-up your profile, and connect with other bands, fans, promoters, and more. And with a user base that is mostly made up of younger folk, Supernova realized that they were ripe for utilizing advertising as a way to further monetize this valuable demographic. Supernova is this month’s Featured Publisher for Direct Media Exchange. Supernova’s CEO is Elliott Hurst; their Director of Interactive, Sanford Liu, answered our questions.

(more…)

We met bloggers. We used the term ‘networking’ profusely. We took pictures.

We (well, at least Cam and I) wore pajamas at the Hard Rock Hotel Pajama Party.

It was fun to meet publishers and show them some of the cool tools we all use to build traffic and better monetize blogs and sites: MyBlogLog, Direct Media Exchange, and the newly acquired network Blue Lithium–just to name a few. Yahoo! was in the running (ranked number one at one point) for the ‘people’s choice’ award for best booth (we lost out in the end, but it was thrilling all the same).

And, of course, there is the video ‘footage’ : our on-the-floor ‘educational sessions’ where we let the attendees teach us. Remember: always listen to your users…

Part 1: John Chow and other attendees
Part 2: Debbie Weil and other attendees

And if “still frames” are more your thing, check out M2’s Flickr set from the conference here.

Thanks to everyone who made this conference–and our attending it–possible!